It was the 13th-century wall of a ruined Cistercian nunnery at the far end of her garden in Norfolk that turned Sarah Sands’s thoughts to exploring monasticism in her final year as the editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. She already had a soft spot for the ‘Thought for the Day’ slot — ‘an oasis of reflection’. But she was finding it increasingly hard to set aside any time for reflection in her busy, noisy, anxiety-filled ‘5G life’ — office meetings from pre-dawn to dusk and evenings of emailing with the phone beeping every few seconds.
In this charming and quirky homage to A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor, on whom she admits to developing an ‘unseemly crush, considering he is dead’, Sands takes us with her on her quest to discover how monks and nuns achieve ‘the interior silence’ that she’s beginning to yearn for.
So, seatbelts on for a global tour of ten living monasteries, at each of which Sands aims to enter briefly but deeply into its essence, sleeping in the uncomfortable bed, eating the plain breakfast, praying in the silent, holy building and, if possible, talking to an inmate about how to achieve any level of serenity.
A visit to Assisi is a day trip from the farmhouse where the chef is cooking a barbecue that evening
She’s honest about craving a cappuccino and chocolate croissant on her first morning at a mountain monastery at Koyasan in Japan, a country she happens to be going to anyway for Today, ahead of the G20 summit. She arrives at the airport fretting that her phone is dead and she hasn’t brought the right adaptor.
I feared for her ability to find any serenity at all in the face of all this.
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